Vancouver, Canada, indie rock quintet Mother Mother will debut in Bend with a show at Volcanic Theatre Pub on Monday. The band released its seventh studio album, "Dance and Cry," late last year. (Submitted photo) - Bulletin

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Vancouver, Canada, indie rock quintet Mother Mother will debut in Bend with a show at Volcanic Theatre Pub on Monday. The band released its seventh studio album, "Dance and Cry," late last year. (Submitted photo)8262144

Mother Mother’s decade-plus career has gone in many stylistic directions, from folk to electro-pop to guitar-driven rock ’n’ roll.

The Vancouver, Canada, quintet’s evolution traced a rough path over more than a decade from its earliest acoustic shows to the full-band spectacle it is known for today. But that journey wasn’t necessarily linear, and it’s not over: November’s “Dance and Cry,” the band’s seventh studio album and third major-label release, features piano ballads, fist-pumping pop anthems and post-punk stompers.

The through-line, then, is the harmony singing. Bandleader, guitarist and songwriter Ryan Guldemond made sure of that when he recruited his sister, Molly Guldemond, on keyboards and vocals and formed the band as an acoustic trio in the mid-2000s.

Many groups will talk about the close-knit harmony singing that happens among family, but the Guldemond siblings never sang together growing up. At that time, the two had just reconnected while living together in Vancouver, and Ryan formed the initial, acoustic version of the group out of his frustration with studying jazz guitar in college.

“The whole thing came as a shock to both us and then our families,” Ryan said recently from home in Vancouver, a few days before heading out on a North American tour that will take Mother Mother to Bend for the first time. The band will perform Monday at Volcanic Theatre Pub.

“I didn’t want to get a drummer and a bassist because that just felt too unreachable in that moment,” Ryan continued. “So it was like, ‘But how can we make this sound big? Why don’t we just get some songs on an acoustic, and then find two backup singers and we’ll just crush great, three-part harmony, and that will create a big sound.’ And I was living with Molly and because she has this really cool speaking voice — she sounds almost like an alien born in a helium tank, but airier and sexier if you can say that about your sister’s voice — I knew that it would translate to great backup singing.”

The band has gone through numerous lineup changes since — initially Debra-Jean Creelman filled the third harmony part, and keyboardist Jasmin Parkin has been in that role since 2009. Soon after forming the group, Ryan decided drums and bass were attainable after all, and today, the rhythm section features drummer Ali Siadat and bassist Mike Young.

“Every album (we release), someone says, ‘I don’t like how you’ve changed,’” Ryan said. “And that’s just part of the deal, part of the beauty of the subjective nature of music and stuff.”

The current tour behind “Dance and Cry” will be the band’s longest to date, Ryan said, with stops in the Pacific Northwest, Midwest, East Coast and throughout Canada. It supports an album that finds Ryan and company returning to their roots while exploring new sounds and songwriting methods. Last year, the band played a 10-year anniversary tour for its second, breakthrough album, 2008’s “O My Heart,” and that affected Ryan’s writing, as well.

“For sure, that had an influence on going back to a grittier, more raw, human production with ‘Dance and Cry,’” he said.

This time around, Ryan wanted to get outside of his head during the writing process. At one point, he traveled to Costa Rica, where he wrote a number of songs on the album including lead single “Get Up.”

“I would wake up and just go out on my deck and listen to what the world had to say,” Ryan said. “If there was an interesting motif in birdsong, I would record it on my phone and go down to the studio and just loop it and see what happened in collaborating with it. So that was sort of the M.O. on this record — I’m not doing this by myself; I’m doing this in cahoots with the elements. And so, I went to Costa Rica as a means to further get out of myself and my comfort zone. A lot of songs down there were written from the elements, from noises, from meeting people, from conversations. I don’t know, it just sort of imbued this record with a magical touch.”

Ryan reunited with producer Ben Kaplan, who last worked with the band on its fourth album, 2012’s “The Sticks.” Kaplan helped shape “It’s Alright,” a shifting, multipart pep talk that has become a fan favorite, Ryan said (a music video is on the way).

“I sent (Kaplan) a bunch of music, and he’s like, ‘Dude, it’s great, but it’s sad, which is great — sad music is great — but maybe you could try to find just an optimistic bookend or something just to let everybody know that it’s gonna be all right and it’s gonna be OK,’” Ryan said. “That language kind of just stuck in my head: OK, it’s all right, it’s OK. And I almost said it almost spitefully to myself as a mantra, because you know, no songwriter likes being given too much direction, especially when they’re being told to cheer up. … I think I did it enough that it was just locked in my psyche, and I woke up one morning, and the chorus was like, boom, right there.”